Catholic church had denied 13-year-old girl sexually assaulted and killed in 1955 a funeral due to arcane rule
There had never been so many people at a funeral in the history of Montedoro, a village suspended in time among wheat fields and abandoned sulphur mines in central Sicily.
Its 1,500 inhabitants had waited for this moment for more than half a century, and on Wednesday gathered in hundreds in solemn prayer in the village church around a small white coffin.
Continue reading...The recent discovery of unmarked graves at residential schools is the latest incident in decades of trauma for Indigenous Canadians, who are using lyricism to process it
After the recent discovery of hundreds of Indigenous children’s unmarked graves at former Canadian residential schools, Drezus – an rapper of Cree and Ojibwe heritage from the Muskowekwan First Nation in Saskatchewan province – grew unsure about his longstanding plans to release a new music video, Bless. He starts the song by calling the atrocities his people have faced “an act of war”, then follows that with bar after bar of Indigenous empowerment. Unsure if that would be appropriate while his people grieved, he turned to his mother, who had attended one of those schools. Her advice? “Release it, son. We need it now.”
This government-funded, Christian church-administered boarding school system was established in Canada in the late 1800s. Its founders’ intent: to forcibly remove Indigenous children from their “savage” parents and impose English and Christianity. Some 150,000 Indigenous children attended these schools before the last one closed in 1997. In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report detailed nearly 38,000 sexual and physical abuse claims from former residential school students, along with 3,200 documented deaths. The mortality rate for those children was estimated to be up to five times higher than their white counterparts, due to factors including suicide, neglect and disease.
Continue reading...In France, a new law could seriously restrict women’s rights to wear headscarves in public, and there are fears that it will entrench Islamophobia
Last October, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, laid out the vision behind a new, deeply controversial bill. The government claimed a minority of France’s estimated 6 million Muslims were at risk of forming a “counter-society” and the bill was designed to tackle the dangers of this “Islamist separatism”.
It is meant to safeguard republican values, but critics, including Amnesty International, have raised serious concerns that it may inhibit freedom of association and expression, and increase discrimination. The new law, say critics, will severely affect the construction of mosques, and give more discretion to local authorities to close local associations deemed in conflict with “Republican principles”, a term often wielded against Muslims specifically. But one of the most controversial points is extending the ban on women wearing headscarves in public sector roles, to private organisations that provide a public service. Further amendments were tabled prohibiting full-length swimsuits (“burkinis”), girls under 18 from wearing the hijab in public, and mothers from wearing hijabs on their children’s school trips. These were subsequently overturned, but the stigma they legitimise lives on.
Continue reading...Painstaking research deciphers carvings of religious bounty dating back almost five centuries
For almost 500 years, the arch that connects the largest Gothic cathedral in the world with its Renaissance sacristy has offered visitors a sumptuous, if little glimpsed – and even less studied – vision of religious bounty.
The 68 beautifully carved plates of food that adorn the archway in Seville’s cathedral offer rather more than bread and wine.
Continue reading...Real estate holdings published for first time show it owns 4,051 properties in Italy, 1,120 abroad
The Vatican has released information on its real estate holdings for the first time, revealing it owns more than 5,000 properties, as part of its most detailed financial disclosures ever.
The information released on Saturday was contained in two documents – a consolidated financial statement for 2020 for the Holy See and the first ever public budget for the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See (Apsa).
Continue reading...The photojournalist Danish Siddiqui was shot dead last week while documenting the Taliban offensive in Afghanistan. His award-winning work for Reuters spanned some of the world’s most era-defining crises.
He said: ‘I shoot for the common man who wants to see and feel a story from a place where he can’t be present himself.’
Siddiqui leaves behind his wife, Rike, and two children. And a breathtaking body of work
Eid al-Adha, the festival of sacrifice, is celebrated throughout the Muslim world to mark Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son for God. Cows, camels, goats and sheep are traditionally slaughtered on this day
Continue reading...A group of talented teens push the boundaries of their religious society by putting on a concert in Nabil Ayouch’s earnest film
Franco-Moroccan director Nabil Ayouch has made a likable, high-energy youth movie that could almost be called the Moroccan answer to Fame and which features that time-honoured plot device: putting on a concert.
Using nonprofessionals playing docu-fictionalised versions of themselves, Ayouch has created a drama revolving around an arts centre for young people that he himself helped to set up in the tough district of Sidi Moumen, called by someone here the Bronx of Casablanca. The school includes a special programme called the Positive School of Hip-Hop. A crowd of smart, talented teens join the class and we watch as they find out the challenges, limits and opportunities of learning self-expression through western-style rap in a Muslim society.
Continue reading...Prohibition can only be implemented against all religious symbols as part of a policy of neutrality
Private employers in the EU can ban people from wearing religious symbols, including headscarves, in order to present an image of neutrality, the bloc’s highest court has ruled.
Companies can ban headscarves provided such a prohibition is part of a policy against all religious and political symbols, the court said on Thursday, reaffirming a 2017 ruling. The latest judgment went further by examining the grounds employers can use when making such prohibitions.
Continue reading...Case involving Mila, who was sent more than 100,000 abusive messages, has fuelled debate about free speech.
A French court has convicted 11 people for harassing a teenager online over her anti-Islam videos in a case that has led to a fierce debate about free speech and the right to insult religions.
The prosecutions were part of a judicial fightback against trolling and online abuse after the girl, known as Mila, had to change schools and accept police protection because of death threats.
Continue reading...Former Children of God member says simple question put to her by Walter Schwarz was life-changing
It was a simple question to a child, one routinely asked by adults: what do you want to be when you grow up? But for 11-year-old Bexy Cameron, who had never known anything but the strict religious cult she was born into, it was life-changing.
Her brief encounter with the Guardian journalist Walter Schwarz in the 1990s led to her escaping the Children of God cult at the age of 15, leaving behind her parents and siblings. Now she has written a memoir, Cult Following, about growing up in a movement founded by a controlling sexual predator. The last line of her acknowledgments reads: “Eternal gratitude to Walter Schwarz (RIP). Who knows what would have happened without that ‘one simple question’?”
Continue reading...Vatican says pontiff will undergo operation for diverticular stenosis of the colon
Pope Francis has been admitted to a hospital in Rome for scheduled surgery on his large intestine, the Vatican has said. The news came just three hours after the pope had cheerfully greeted the public in St Peter’s Square and told them he would visit Hungary and Slovakia in September.
The brief statement from the Holy See’s press office did not say exactly when the surgery would be performed at the Gemelli Polyclinic, a Catholic teaching hospital, only that there would be a medical update when the surgery was complete. However, sources indicated that the surgery would be carried out later on Sunday.
Continue reading...After hundreds of unmarked graves were found at Canada’s former Catholic-run residential schools, churches in First Nations territories have been destroyed by suspected arson
For more than a century, the clapboard church set amid rolling hills in western Canada has been a spiritual home to the Upper Similkameen Indian Band.
To build St Anne’s, residents of Chuchuwayha Indian Reserve #2 travelled 40 miles to the closest town, hauling lumber back to their community by horse and wagon.
Continue reading...After the discovery of 751 unmarked graves at the site of a former school for Native children in Canada, it is time to investigate similar abuses in the US
There is so much mourning Native people have yet to do. The full magnitude of Native suffering has yet to be entirely understood, especially when it comes to the nightmarish legacies of American Indian boarding schools. The purpose of the schools was “civilization”, but, as I have written elsewhere, boarding schools served to provide access to Native land, by breaking up Native families and holding children hostage so their nations would cede more territory. And one of the primary benefactors of the boarding school system is the Catholic church, which is today the world’s largest non-governmental landowner, with roughly 177 million acres of property throughout the globe. Part of the evidence of how exactly the church acquired its wealth in North America is literally being unearthed, and it exists in stories of the Native children whose lives it stole, which includes my own family.
The full magnitude of Native suffering has yet to be entirely understood, especially when it comes to the nightmarish legacies of American Indian boarding schools
Continue reading...Two more Catholic churches on First Nations reserves in western Canada have been destroyed by fires that investigators are once again treating as suspicious.
Over the weekend, crews in southern British Columbia responded to early morning blazes at St Ann’s Church on Upper Similkameen Indian Band land, and the Chopaka Church on the lands of the Lower Similkameen Indian Band. Both churches, built from wood and more than 100 years old, were burned to the ground.
Continue reading...Cases of transnational repression found in 28 countries are ‘just the tip of the iceberg’, say rights researchers
China is using its unprecedented economic clout across vast swathes of Asia and the Middle East to target Uyghur Muslims living beyond its borders through a sprawling system of transnational repression, a new report says.
Beijing’s crackdown on Xinjiang province, where more than 1 million people are thought to have been detained in a network of internment camps in recent years, has coincided with a rise in efforts to control Uyghurs living overseas, the report found.
Continue reading...‘Tragic’ closure of Sabeen Mahmud’s community venue T2F in Karachi comes as PM Imran Khan accused of fostering censorship and intolerance
Danial Shah turned to Sabeen Mahmud, for help with his first photo exhibition when all other organisations refused to show his work. Shah’s photographs cover political and cultural issues, such as local elections and women’s rights. Some refused to work with him on political grounds, while others did not reply at all.
After a meeting at Mahmud’s community space, T2F, in Karachi, Pakistan’s biggest city, she agreed to host his exhibition. But Mahmud, a 40-year-old human rights activist who oversaw a programme of progressive arts at T2F, did not get to see Shah’s first exhibition. She was murdered a few months after their meeting.
Continue reading...Priest undergoing disciplinary hearing in Athens is suspected of attack that put clerics in hospital
Seven bishops from the Greek Orthodox Church have been hurt in an acid attack by a priest undergoing a disciplinary hearing in Athens, police said.
Three of the bishops were still in hospital following the attack late on Wednesday, while a police officer who was at the scene was also being treated, police added. Local media in Greece reported that those attacked had suffered burns, mostly on their faces.
Continue reading...Law calls into question the church’s ‘freedom of organisation’ and threatens ‘freedom of thought’, letter claims
The Vatican has made an unprecedented intervention urging the Italian government to change a proposed law that would criminalise homophobia over concerns it will infringe upon the Catholic church’s “freedom of thought”.
A letter delivered by British archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, the Vatican’s secretary of relations with states, said parts of the legislation violated a treaty made between Italy and the Catholic church in the 1920s that secured the freedoms and rights of the church, Corriere della Sera reported.
Continue reading...Hungarian-born Zsolt Balla speaks of his ‘historic responsibility’ to serve Jewish soldiers
The German army has installed its first rabbi as a religious counsellor in 100 years, in a symbol of the renewal of Jewish life decades after the Holocaust.
Priests and pastors are already providing religious services to the estimated 94,000 Christians in the military.
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